December Accolades

Posted: December 1, 2004 at 1:00 am, Last Updated: November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am

Accolades is a monthly column recognizing the latest achievements of George Mason faculty and staff members. Submit Accolades information by the 15th of the month preceding to Attn: Daily Gazette, by mail to 4C5, by fax to 703-993-8784, or by e-mail to gazette@gmu.edu. Electronic photos with submissions are welcome.

Administration

Anne Agee, Ann Genovese, and Kathy Gillette, Division of Instructional and Technology Support Services (DoIT), Information Technology Unit, co-presented a preconference seminar and a conference workshop at the EDUCAUSE national conference in Denver. Their session, “Culture Change: What IT Takes to Create a Quality Customer Service Environment,” described how George Mason’s information technology culture has changed to make providing quality customer service one of its highest priorities.

College of Arts and Sciences

Karen L. Bune, Criminal Justice, has successfully met the requirements for designation as a Fellow of the American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress. Fellowship is the highest honor the academy can bestow and is awarded to professionals who have made significant contributions to the field and to the academy. Bune, a victim specialist in the domestic violence unit of the State’s Attorney’s Office for Prince George’s County, is a nationally recognized consultant and speaker on victim issues and was selected for inclusion in the 2005 edition of Manchester Who’s Who.

Dee Ann Holisky and Anne Agee, DoIT, Information Technology Unit, hosted, along with administrators from Claremont McKenna College, North Carolina State University, and DePauw University, a full-day preconference seminar at the EDUCAUSE national conference in Denver. “The Whole Is Greater Than the Parts: Models for Systemic Transformation of Teaching and Learning” explored how diverse institutions can combine faculty and student support, curriculum development, and facilities development to achieve transformative technology and learning programs suited to unique needs.

Cindy Lont

Cindy Lont, Communication, was chair and respondent at the Feminist and Women’s Studies Division panel on “Identity Construction in the Realm of the Popular” at the National Communication Association Conference in Chicago. She was also elected chair of the nominating committee for the Mass Communication Division at that conference.

Walter Morris and Lizette Zietsman, Mathematical Sciences, gave invited talks at the fall 2004 Eastern Meeting of the American Mathematical Society at the University of Pittsburgh. Morris presented “A Generalization of the Holt-Klee Theorem,” and Zietsman spoke in the special session on “Multiscale Algorithms in Computational Fluid Dynamics.”

Young-Chan Ro, Philosophy and Religious Studies, received the Yulgok Award from the Academy of Yulgok Studies for significant scholarly contributions to Korean Neo-Confucian studies. Ro’s specialties include cross-cultural and comparative studies of religion.

Russ Roberts, Economics and Mercatus Center, spoke at the Myths and Realities of Globalization Conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Roberts’ address was “The Surprising Effects of Outsourcing.”

Colleen Shogan, Public and International Affairs, participated in a roundtable discussion at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. The topic, “The Presidential Election and Congressional Agenda: Mandate for Change or More of the Same,” was debated by Shogan and Lee Rawls, chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist; Burns Rider, policy adviser to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; and Washington Post journalist Charles Babington.

Lisa Sparks, Communication, served as MCAT test reviewer assessing interpersonal communication competencies for the Association of American Medical Colleges and the Educational Testing Service. She serves on the access committee of the Fairfax County Long Term Care Task Force. Sparks also recently presented “Cross-cultural Social Identity and Health: An Intergroup Approach” and “Cancer Care and the Aging Patient: Complexities of Age-Related Communication Barriers” to the Ninth International Conference on Language and Social Psychology in State College, Penn. She also presented “Communication in the Healthcare Consumer-Provider Relationship: Construction and Validation of a ‘Breaking Bad News’ Satisfaction Scale” to the Health Communication and Interpersonal Communication Divisions of the National Communication Association in Chicago.

Daniele Struppa

Daniele Struppa co-wrote Analysis of Dirac Systems and Computational Algebra, which was published by Birkhauser in 2004. The book addresses the work of Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, a scholar who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1933 after finding a connection between relativity and quantum mechanics that became known as the spin-1/2 Dirac equation.

Valeriu Soltan and James Lawrence, Mathematical Sciences, organized and gave talks at a special session on Convexity and Combinatorics at the fall 2004 Eastern Meeting of the American Mathematical Society at the University of Pittsburgh.

Ming Wan, Public and International Affairs, gave a speech at the symposium to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the founding of the Graduate School of Social Sciences, Waseda University, Tokyo.

College of Education and Human Development

David Anderson

David Anderson gave two workshops at the Nineteenth Annual College Alcohol Conference in Virginia Beach, sponsored by the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control with funding from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. The workshops were “Evaluation of Campus-Based Impaired Driving Efforts” and “Impaired Driving Prevention with College Students: History, Preparations, and Impact.” He also introduced and facilitated the anonymous, keypad-based decision software during one of the conference’s keynote speeches. Anderson conducted a workshop on “Evaluation and Accountability” for campus fraternity and sorority leaders implementing the Alcohol Summit process. Sponsored by the North American Interfraternity Conference and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, this session focused on evaluation strategies appropriate for the alcohol reduction efforts being undertaken by the campus. He also made three presentations at the U.S. Department of Education’s 18th Annual National Meeting on “Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse” and “Violence Prevention in Higher Education,” held in Arlington. He led a workshop, “Leadership With Accountability: Steps to Make a Difference,” that focused on the Action Planner workbook prepared with and companion to the Promising Practices: Campus Alcohol Strategiesproject. He served on a panel, “On the Horizon in College Alcohol and Violence Prevention: Five Experts Talk about Civic Engagement and Service Learning as Prevention Strategies.” He also presented a poster session, “What Longitudinal Research Tells Us: Results From the College Alcohol Survey (1979-2003).”

Marjorie Hall Haley was the keynote speaker for the Maryland Foreign Language Association’s Annual Conference at the Prince George’s Community College in Largo. Her address was “Valuing Diverse Learners.”

Mark Hicks, Educational Transformation, and Carla Shere, Learning Leaders (New York), were given the John B. Muir Editor’s Award, which recognizes the author or authors who have made the most significant contribution to the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s Journal of College Admission during the past year. The award was for their series of articles, “Toward Reflective Admission Work: Making the Case for a Transformative Approach to Admission Practice and Reflection in Action” and “Toward Reflective Admission Work: New Directions for Thoughts and Practice.”

Joan Isenberg represented the United States on an international panel, “Current Trends and Issues in Early Childhood Teacher Education: A Global Perspective,” at the annual conference of the National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators in Anaheim, Calif. Other panel members included early childhood teacher educators from Canada, China, Korea, Japan, and Nigeria. At the same conference, Isenberg presented a session on “Leadership for Early Childhood Teacher Educators” with colleagues from Arizona State University and California State University.

Layne Kalbfleisch was invited by the organization president to present a special session at the National Association for Gifted Children annual meeting in Salt Lake City. The session was titled “Hard-wired for Talent: The Functional Neural Anatomy of Talent,” and sponsored by the Esther Katz Rosen Center for Gifted Education Policy at the American Psychological Association.

Elijah Mirochnik led an arts-based participatory performance session, “Scoreless Bowling: Rocking the Rules of the Testing Game through a Live Experiment in Play and Power,” at the JCT (Journal of Curriculum Theorizing) Annual Conference in Dayton. The scoreless bowling session was the first session in the history of the 25-year-old conference to take place in a bowling alley. Twenty-five professors from the United States and Canada attended the session.

College of Visual and Performing Arts

Linda Monson

Linda Apple Monson, Music, was guest artist at Davidson College, Charlotte, N.C., where she performed a solo piano recital and gave a piano master class. She performed a 20th-century program with solo piano works by Alban Berg, Ross Lee Finney, George Crumb, and Glenn Smith, Music.

Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution

Marc Gopin’s new book, Healing the Heart of Conflict: Eight Crucial Steps to Making Peace with Yourself and Others, has been published by Rodale, 2004. Gopin presents an eight-step process, drawing upon wisdom from world religions, philosophy, conflict theory, and psychology, for healing even the most destructive, and seemingly intractable, conflicts.

Linda Johnston has been appointed to the board of directors of the Global Peace Service, a national peace organization in Washington, D.C.

Richard Rubenstein

Richard Rubenstein moderated a panel of international journalists discussing overseas press coverage of United States foreign policy. The panel on “Media and Politics,” held at the Pohick Regional Library in Burke, Va., included Kaarle Nordenstreng, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Tampere, Finland; Edward “Buzz” Palmer, a founder of the Black Press Institute in Chicago, president of the Chicago-based People’s Program, and a distinguished visiting practitioner at ICAR; and Milton Viorst, author of Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern World, who has covered the Middle East for the New Yorker and other publications for more than 20 years. This panel was the first in a three-part series cosponsored by the League of Women Voters Education Funds of the United States and the Fairfax Area, and By the People. The series will continue on Jan. 9 and Feb. 27. Rubenstein also conducted a conference in Washington, D.C., on “News Media Coverage of Violent Conflicts: European, American, and Global Perspectives.” The conference, supported by ICAR, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, and the People’s Program, brought together 30 journalists, media specialists, and conflict scholars from Europe, Asia, Latin America, the United Nations, and the United States to discuss how media coverage of violent or potentially violent social conflicts can be improved, and make concrete suggestions for the education of journalists and the formation of new journalist and scholar networks. Follow-up activities are being planned. Rubenstein was keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Department of Judaic and Mideast Studies at the University of Connecticut at Stamford. His topic was “Jews and Muslims: Sources of Conflict and Prospects for Resolution.”

Dennis J.D. Sandole was recently in Thailand as a U.S. State Department Public Diplomacy lecturer, discussing with university, think-tank, and media audiences the growing Thai-Muslim/Thai-Buddhist and Thai government conflict in the southern part of the country. During the trip, which included southern Thailand and Bangkok, he visited the area where the violence has been taking place, speaking with Muslims and Buddhists about how to deal with the situation.

Robinson Professors

Vassily Aksyonov, Robinson Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature and Writing, wrote a novel, Moscow Saga, which is the basis for a popular 24-part miniseries on Russian TV, as described in the Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2004.

Robert Hazen, Robinson Professor of Earth Sciences, gave a lecture, “Left and Right: Geochemical Origins of Life’s Homochirality,” at the Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Paleobiology Seminar Series. He gave the inaugural lecture in the Chemical Engineering Seminar Series, “Origins of Life,” at Carnegie Mellon University, and lectures on “Origins of Life” at Old Dominion University and the Naval Research Laboratory.

Harold Morowitz, Robinson Professor of Biology and Natural Philosophy, presented a paper, “Universality in Intermediary Metabolism,” which was published in the August issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

John Paden

John Paden, Robinson Professor of International Affairs, wrote the chapter, “Unity with Diversity: Toward Democratic Federalism,” which was included in the book, Crafting the New Nigeria: Confronting the Challenges, edited by R. I. Rotberg and published by Lynne Reinner, 2004. He also wrote a paper, “Islam in Africa: The Nigerian Model,” which was published in the Aspen Institute Conference on Political Islam: Challenges for U.S. Policy, vol. 19, no. 4.

James Trefil, Robinson Professor of Physics, gave a lecture, “Managing the Planet—Hard Science and Hard Choices,” at the Philosophical Society of Washington.

Roger Wilkins, Robinson Professor of History and American Culture, gave a lecture on “Jefferson’s Pillow” for the Brookings Institution conference on emerging public leaders. He was moderator and co-chair of the conference on “A National Task Force on Public Education: Renewing Our Schools, Securing Our Future,” held at Harris-Stowe State College in St. Louis. He received the 38th annual Founders’ Award from the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities and was the keynote speaker at the event, held in Chicago. Wilkins was a lecturer on “50 Years after Brown v. Board of Education: The Ongoing Role of Racism in a ‘Colorblind’ Society” at an institute held at George Washington University.